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Não é impunemente que se contrata alguém com uma experiência que o moldou na forma de ver o mundo e a tomar decisões."Call it the revenge of the bean counters. Headhunters say that finance talent is in high demand across the board. Even when CFOs aren't moving into the top job, their sway and stature are growing.
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Part of what's driving the ascendance of CFOs is their reputation as staid, risk-averse leaders at a time when the world is in turmoil. During periods of uncertainty, boards tend to default to a steady (some might even say boring) hand at the helm. Managing complex issues such as regulatory challenges, geopolitical tensions, market volatility and higher interest rates-and knowing how to adeptly talk to Wall Street about all of it—plays to a CFO's strengths. "It's absolutely indicative of the current feeling about the global economy," says Ty Wiggins, a leadership adviser to CEOs.
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But more than anything else, the CFO-turned-CEO movement is a symptom of the priorities prevailing in corporate America right now, many of them of the slashing-and cutting and financial engineering variety.
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It's that very mindset, one focused on profit rather than growth, that historically held CFOs back from climbing further up the corporate ladder. But now that an emphasis on the bottom line is in fashion, so are CFOs.
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Some data suggest that letting the finance folks run the joint doesn't always pay off big. Of the four most common paths to the top job, the CFO-turned-CEO is the least likely to outperform based on gains in shareholder value, according to a 2023 study by executive search company Spencer Stuart.
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Human nature may be to blame for the lagging performance. People focus on and excel at the things they're most familiar with-and, no surprise, for finance executives that's profitability. "As CFO, they have to act as the disciplinarian to let the CEO lean into growth," says Claudius Hildebrand, a Spencer Stuart consultant who conducted the study. So when a CFO moves to the top job, "it's a huge mindset shift," he says. "You cannot save your way to prosperity. At some point you need to be careful to not cut too close to the bone."
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The bigger risk to a company comes when the rise of the CFO reflects a board's desire to make cost-cutting a top priority. Across corporate America, worshipping at the altar of efficiency has taken hold, and that can easily cross over into cutting corners, with disastrous consequences.
There is no more apt case study than Boeing Co. "It's a classic example of what happens when cost-cutters take over a company," says Bill George, the onetime CEO of Medtronic who is now an executive fellow at Harvard Business School. "Boeing had four financially oriented CEOs running the company, and it's paying a tremendous price now."
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In a 2004 interview with the Chicago Tribune, then-Boeing CEO Harry Stonecipher said the quiet part out loud: "When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it's run like a business rather than a great engineering firm. It is a great engineering firm, but people invest in a company because they want to make money."
That right there is the risk of what happens when you let the number crunchers take over the place. Suddenly a company can forget that its job is to make a quality product, not just a profit."
Trechos retirados de "More CFOs Are Getting CEO Jobs. Beth Kowitt on what's behind that trend"
